[grawprog]

I'm not sure how directly comparable they are. How do you compare radioactive and chemical contamination to the kind of contamination from coal mines?

Pollution isn't always a thing you can measure on a scale from bad to less bad. There's long term systemic effects from the countless contaminants released by industries around the world we barely have any idea about.

I realize economic models, and fairly frighteningly, increasingly ecological models require easy to work with numbers that can be compared and contrasted to analyse cost vs benefit, but the real world does not work that way.

[Swenrekcah]

Using this comment to remind people that coal plants do produce radioactive exhaust: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

[mike_d]

In an exhaustive study of attributable deaths per TWH of power generated, nuclear is safer than wind and solar. Even when you factor in scary words like "radioactive contamination," people falling off roofs installing solar panels is still more dangerous.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

[QuarterReptile]

Worth mentioning that Chernobyl is included in this data. If someone has a worse long-tail risk in mind, it would be interesting to hear.

The risk from contamination is certainly below coal, which generates far greater quantities of RAM, with constituents being basically consistent with nuclear plant waste.

[mlyle]

Hard to estimate long tail risks.

Chernobyl definitely didn't turn out as bad as it could have, but on the other hand hopefully we're in a bit better of a safety stance now across the industry than Chernobyl was in?

[bigfudge]

The real long tail risks from nuclear are the long term ones, which aren't factored in because we don't know what nuclear storage sites will be like in 100 or 1000 years. That's what many rational people object to about nuclear power — it involves a massive discounting of future risk, and we know people are really bad at over-discounting future risk in general.